Devices

Devices has both it’s own special page in our app, but also can be used as generic search/filter/split/group by fields.

Here’s a neat trick you can do with the Devices page – identify devices that haven’t made a single call in the past X days/weeks/months.  Read on below to find out how!

Devices setup

The Devices page doesn’t *require* any setup, but there are optional things you can do or set up to make it even better.

Much of this is explained in our app’s menu item Setup > Define devices

1. We also have a second app, the Supporting AXL App for Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics, that can be used to query CUCM via AXL to pull a canonical list of all devices, along with information about that device.
   • Field list retrieved is: callingSearchSpaceName, department, description, devicePool, mailId, name, productName, protocol, securityProfileName, userFullName, userId.
   • This can be scheduled to stay updated without effort.
2. Or you can download the CSV, fill it out even with just a list of all the device names, and upload it back into it.

Obviously with the first option you’ll have a ton of information at your fingertips.  You can search and filter on, split by, aggregate by or otherwise report on any of those fields.

But *both* options let you show devices that haven’t made calls in the last X number of days.

Devices special page

Browse > Devices

Here’s what you might get if you Browse > Devices

Useful tricks to do on this page

(And really, this is a set of options/items that you’ll want to read through and try each one – it won’t take long, I promise!)

1. Filter by
   • site, if you have sites set up
   • device name (wildcards allowed)
   • number (wildcards allowed)
2. Select any subset of device types – hardphones, softphones, unityvm, conference bridges – whatever you have in your data that you’d like to pick from.
3. Change your time frame
4. Two very useful options:
   • a) include or don’t include devices that made no calls in the timeframe, if you have devices set up as above.
   • b) count or don’t count calls with zero duration in the totals
5. Add or remove fields from the table
6. If you have the AXL add-on installed and configured, some additional fields will be non-blank, like these.
7. If you have sites set up, you can also add the site into this field list.
8. See when the device last made a call
   • NOTE this first line, cipc-ZionE.  It has not made a phone call in the past 24 hours (see the time frame #3)
   • By having item #4a turned on, and the device list in your system, we can determine that device X exists but hasn’t sent in a CDR record in the time period involved.
   • So, by making the timeframe larger and sorting by that last_seen column, you can identify devices that have not made any calls ever, or in the past year or for however long you have data.

 

Device Detail

Clicking on any row in Browse > Devices will take you to a page that gives you more information on that Device.

Devices general use

Find Device Fields

• In the app click the “Home” in the upper left.
  
• In the bottom half of the home screen pick “Devices”
  
• There are a lot of device fields available, so take a look!
• Generally, fields that start with orig_device are originating device information that we create in the app
• And ones that start with dest_device are destination device information that we create in the app
• If it doesn’t have either orig or dest, it’s a rollup of “all the devices on that call”.
• The ones with camel case, like origDeviceName are ones that Cisco provides.

See our blog post on the Field Gallery for more information.

Displaying the fields in Browse Calls

These fields are enabled by default. To see them in Browse Calls, simply add them with the field picker.

1. Click Edit Fields in the upper right.
2. Find the field you want to add either by scrolling around, or use the filter field.
3. Click to add fields to the Selected Fields list.
4. Click and drag to rearrange the fields on the right.
5. Remove extra fields by clicking their “x”.
   

There are a lot of fields available here, we’re only adding a few so we don’t overload the screen.

Simple Filtering on Group/Subgroup in Browse Calls

Once you have a field showing, you can click on it to open a little menu to include only results with that value or exclude those.

For instance, here I’ve clicked on jabberiphone in the orig_device_type field and selected search for orig_device_type="jabberiphone"

and that added it to search filters and filtered the list.

Similarly, you could

• Exclude a particular originating gateway slot, like NOT orig_gateway_slot="S0" by picking the exclude orig_gateway_slot="S0" option.
• Include all calls that crossed a destDeviceName that contained “somecorp.com” like destDeviceName="*somecorp.com"
  • In BOTH cases – do note that search filters is just a text box – you can and occasionally may need to edit it.
  • In that case, pick an option that’s close, then just type over top of it to add a * or change a value.

These search filters follow you though to General Report if you click the “Graph calls over time” link in the upper right (Circled in green as well).

Using in General Report

There are a several options for using this information in General Report.

Using it as a search “filter”

The easy way to do this, obviously, is to go back to Browse > Calls and add the filter there, then click the link in the right to >> graph calls over time to end up in General Report with that filtering set.  See previous topic for more information.

Likewise, these search filters follow you BACK through to Browse Calls if you click the “see calls” link in the upper right.  In this way you can jump between Browse Calls to occasionally sanity check what you are seeing, while still browsing around different time frames in general report.

Using it as a “over” or “split by” field

Another way is to use it in the over field.  This is usually better as a column chart because it will then make buckets of each field’s contents and count how many were in each bucket.

Here we’ve included a search filter – this is optional, but entirely possible.  In this case we’re using that to exclude all gateways from this list, leaving just non-gateways.

 

And the last example is of using it in the split by field.  Here, instead of building buckets like above, we just split the overall totals into “by orig_device_type”.  A picture is worth a thousand words here.

There are other ways you can use this information too, we’ve only give you the tip of the iceberg in this documentation.

If you have any comments at all about the documentation, please send it in to docs@sideviewapps.com.